When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back to visit.

We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. When we speak of time, we’re usually referring to change. But change isn’t the same thing as time.

To measure anything’s position precisely is to “lock in” on one static frame of its motion, as in a film. Conversely, as soon as you observe movement, you can’t isolate a frame, because motion is the summation of many frames. Sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. Consider a film of a flying arrow that stops on a single frame. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy: it’s 20 feet above the grandstand. But you’ve lost all information about its momentum. It’s going nowhere; its path is uncertain.

Numerous experiments confirm that such uncertainty is built into the fabric of reality. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a fundamental concept of quantum physics. However, it only makes sense from a biocentric perspective. According to biocentrism, time is the inner sense that animates the still frames of the spatial world. Remember, you can’t see through the bone surrounding your brain; everything you experience is woven together in your mind. So what’s real? If the next image is different from the last, then it’s different, period. We can award change with the word “time,” but that doesn’t mean that there’s an invisible matrix in which changes occur.

At each moment we’re at the edge of a paradox described by the Greek philosopher Zeno. Because an object can’t occupy two places simultaneously, he contended that an arrow is only at one place during any given instant of its flight. To be in one place, however, is to be at rest. The arrow must therefore be at rest at every instant of its flight. Thus, motion is impossible. But is this really a paradox? Or rather, is it proof that time (motion) isn’t a feature of the outer, spatial world, but rather a conception of thought?

In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal intuition. They’re tools of the mind and thus don’t exist as external objects independent of life. When we feel poignantly that time has elapsed, as when loved ones die, it constitutes the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. That, to us, is time. It belongs with us.

In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, “There is no way to remove the observer — us — from our perceptions of the world … In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.”

That night, while lying awake at my neighbor’s house, I had found the answer — that the missing piece is with us. As I see it, immortality doesn’t mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking.Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around. Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there’s a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time — past or future — as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.

“Robert Lanza was taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B.F. Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His mentors described him as a ‘genius,’ a ‘renegade thinker,’ even likening him to Einstein himself.” – US News & World Report, cover story.

Robert Lanza is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and a professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has several hundred publications and inventions, and over two dozen scientific books: among them, Principles of Tissue Engineering, which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. Others include One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (Foreword by President Jimmy Carter), and the Handbook of Stem Cells and Essentials of Stem Cell Biology, which are considered the definitive references in stem cell research. Dr. Lanza received his BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He was also a Fulbright Scholar, and was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo, as well as the first to clone an endangered species, to demonstrate that nuclear transfer could reverse the aging process, and to generate stem cells using a method that does not require the destruction of human embryos.

Dr. Lanza was awarded the 2005 Rave Award for Medicine by Wired Magazine, and received the 2006 “All Star” Award for Biotechnology by Mass High Tech. Dr. Lanza and his research have been featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including all the major TV networks, CNN, TIME, Newsweek, People Magazine, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post,Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among others. Lanza has worked with some of the greatest thinkers of our time, including Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter. Lanza worked closely with B.F. Skinner at Harvard University. Lanza and Skinner (the “Father of modern behaviorism”) published a number of scientific papers together. He has also worked with Jonas Salk (discoverer of the Polio vaccine) and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard.